Solid Quarter

Visit Trembling Pillow Press for poetry books, broadsides, chapbooks, and Solid Quarter Magazine.

Visit New Orleans Poetry Fest for the annual 4 day poetry festival directed by Bill Lavender and Megan Burns.

Megan Burns' Poeticsofbone&city project on Tumblr



Wednesday, October 30, 2019

State of Memory

State of Memory

identify with the object of affection
past appropriate, graffiti your heart
box cars: tap, tap, tap

where the softest parts, where did we go
off course, i wanted not knowing what i want
i whispered to nothing, with you
i found a quieting i have never known

it disappears: i gathered safe
from unsafe people           for a memory to fix 
they have to be encoded
turned hopeless on hope: photograph
locked: make it summon, make it occur

coat the heat of edge along desire
why attachment sings disaster
                rapid shifts in mood  
under the impact of implicit memory 
swiped enough faces to buy my freedom
on each wrist braceleted escape

i was decentralized, walked 3 rings round
a burnt cindering, shame is what i cast in
i care not for the small narrative of power
framed upon sands

we traveled 93 million miles in 8 minutes

find yourself lost between languages
the printing plate, heavy, burnished
stains clear: my childhood tucked

under synapses, a gate left unlocked
loose a whole herd, what's an unreasonable

amount of data, what happened before new orleans
tell a photon how to avoid absorption
under 40,000 years but it takes eternity
i tried to be brave but there was a lot of time
left: a drowning held under only long
enough to panic, & you see stars that are not our star
our star, our star, sing a song




Saturday, October 12, 2019

Pegasus

winged myth downloaded
a woman snaked by rape
no one need be beholden in stone
for that forked telling

let them bake beauty into a cake
fed us, i could see bodies strapped to the bed
in the long night of song

why not use what you know
to build -- let me understand
three options & sell to the highest bidder
if you wade into currency

they already own you
money has no meaning, but what
you create, they have the power to steal

adorn truth in a masking, slip silent
under the web, i packed it in lines
burnt into me while traveling
behind veils, where this side rings not

is fleeting what you worry under
& if you can't see that, you are
far under still, you won't know freedom


you've been confined your whole life
shackles thin enough for you to grasp at joy
but have you asked yourself why it doesn't last

have you ever wondered why
suffering has been fed to you
your entire existence

the sticky embrace called "hope"
that isn't holding you but holding you down
don't read the words, it's shaped in the sound
the virus is uploaded daily directly into your mind
you call it living, but there has never been an "alive"

if you try to disentangle, you will see arise
inside you: the sicknesses they have coded
to keep you just hooked enough to not sink


Friday, October 04, 2019

Probable Minds

....this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. 
-E. Schrodinger

oh,
             dark seer of folding tongues
how i laid under
the cross hatched gist of touching lids
there, there mockery for a joint
gone blue into tempest
having found the last notes
of this bleak dawning
no one knows what you are
each morning, how you learn
about love from a leaning in
to say what will you temper
flow rapid like water to the lowest
licking point, put yourself into every
part of me until my body pulls tight
& rode down the bucking heat
i forget where one of us ends
& the other begins & it is no matter

as words have edges that people do not

Wednesday, October 02, 2019

Random Disruption :: Contained Object

Border /
                      Line


i.

i want to show you the moutains
holding up the phone, the screen fills
with desert, your voice suspended, they are farther than they seem

            i know          about running out of space

 the world not wild enough  
  can’t we still get married, you laugh

       we can do anything            if it comes to cruelty
                       scenery slipping past

                   i have $20.00 left and nowhere to go and HIV
                     & echo: what kills us
   wherever you go, there you are

ii.

look, she tells me over the cards, you are never going to get
what you needed        
       i get on stages flowing over, what is constant
is the way i can’t hold     the memory of any sweetness  
   i forget that love exists in the absence of a body before me
       they call it splitting: the way i fold down between acts
                  i pretend to understand cues.    


iii.

you will turn on me or i will turn on you       & then time passes

     loneliness makes a small rip, then grows to erase even safe

     i know something about people who no one can love

         it’s dry and hot and cold at night   (endures)
            we are stuck here. it seems (untethered) the sun melts

i will never find you. and you will never see me.  that is what family means


iv.

                                 The observed cannot be separated from the observer.

i think i am beginning to understand              that we are not dependent on the universe

           as much as it is dependent upon us               to see it clearly        

i named every tear after a star. i tacked them to the night sky
above our heads and sang to you across death valley

           a barycenter contains an inherent two-body problem  
                                neither holds, either is the shifting space that threatens
a double star is just an illusion of light            it is hard to measure
      what any one person ever gives another person in this life